On Tue, 12 Feb 2002, Markus Kuhn wrote: > > The more I look into the subject of bidi text terminals, the more I am > of the opinion that the POSIX platform should *not* attempt to have > universal bidi support. Leave this to special-purpose programs and don't > use Hebrew or Arabic in file names, shell scripts, etc. If you *really* > have to (why?), then encode the strings in LTR visual order, not in > writing order.
Too late. Hebrew (And I figure that arabic) is already used for filenames on windows, and many people got used to that. > > Right-to-left writing was invented a few millenia ago because it is more > convenient for right-handed operators of chisel and hammer. In my honest > opinion, RTL writing has no place in the computer age. It is used > primarily for non-rational religiousreasons and just messes up > everything else tremendously if used on text terminals. May be, use it > in selected GUI word processors and web browsers, along with Syriac, > Hieroglyphs, Mathematics, top-down Chinese and other special-interest > scripts with complex rendering requirements, but do not expect that it > will ever be feasible to support it really nicely in generic plaintext > handled by terminal emulators. ECMA-48 is just as big an unsatisfactory > hack as *any* other proposal for handling bidi in terminals that I have > seen so far. I read my mail in pine in an xterm. I don't expect people to start sending mail in visual encoding of hebrew (that would be plain silly). Another example: Consider a program with both an X interface (written in gtk or qt) and a full-screen terminal interface. Both interfaces share the same text strings for translations. Suppose I want to have a hebrew translation of such a program. For both of the above uses it would have been enough to disable the bidi support of the terminal, had there been bidi support in the application itself. I've been using xterm-bidi (patch #27) for a while now. xterm-bidi isn't very "smart" in handling bidi. I slightly modified it to apply the logical->visual transformation with a neutral context (not with an LTR context, as in the original patch). This sometimes results in some strange behaviours if the display contains some numbers that are nor surronded by letters, but it laso allows me to read hebrew messages in pine resonably well. If a message contains too complex a mix of hebrew and english I have to diable the bidi support and use a better filter to do the conversion. Since I don't expect bidi support in ncurses, slang and co. any time soon, bidi supoprt in xterm would be highly appreciated, even if it is not perfect, because it handles the "common cases". Its most important feature will be that it could be disabled, for cases where it does more damage than good. > > I think, the most relevant standards for using Arabic and Hebrew on > computers should be ISO 233 and ISO 259. The Turkish culture managed to > escape from the RTL script they used earlier last century without > significant troubles, and I can only highly recommend the same to others > as the only viable long-term solution. > > References: > > ISO 233:1984 Documentation -- Transliteration of Arabic characters > into Latin characters > > ISO 233-2:1993 Information and documentation -- Transliteration of > Arabic characters into Latin characters -- Part 2: Arabic language > -- Simplified transliteration > > ISO 233-3:1999 Information and documentation -- Transliteration of > Arabic characters into Latin characters -- Part 3: Persian language > -- Simplified transliteration > > ISO 259:1984 Documentation -- Transliteration of Hebrew characters > into Latin characters > > ISO 259-2:1994 Information and documentation -- Transliteration of > Hebrew characters into Latin characters -- Part 2: Simplified > transliteration I have heard of various such attempts. None has managed to get any decent ammount of support. There exists simply too much litreture in right-to-left hebrew and arabic. Bidirectional support is now well established (e.g: part of unicode's specs). Trying to teach people to read from left to right would be very difficult. -- Tzafrir Cohen /"\ mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign Taub 229, 972-4-829-3942, X Against HTML Mail http://www.technion.ac.il/~tzafrir / \ _______________________________________________ I18n mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/i18n
